I wrote a small python script (and Haskell source + binary) for seaching /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask for data about masked packages. It shows the masked package(s), who masked them, and the reason for the mask.

Example output of "emasked ghc":

Code:

Package(s):
dev-lang/ghc-bin

Masked by:
Duncan Coutts <dcoutts@gentoo.otg> (05 Nov 2007)

Reason:
dev-lang/ghc-bin is going away, use dev-lang/ghc instead.
You can USE=binary with dev-lang/ghc to get the effect of ghc-bin.

The usage is: "emasked ATOM" where ATOM is a POSIX regex matching some porition of the package atom.

There may already be a utility like this, I didn't check too much; if there is, this isn't meant to be "better" or anything. I just had a need and thought others might as well.

I wrote a small python script (and Haskell source + binary) for seaching /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask for data about masked packages. It shows the masked package(s), who masked them, and the reason for the mask.

Example output of "emasked ghc":

Code:

Package(s):
dev-lang/ghc-bin

Masked by:
Duncan Coutts <dcoutts@gentoo.otg> (05 Nov 2007)

Reason:
dev-lang/ghc-bin is going away, use dev-lang/ghc instead.
You can USE=binary with dev-lang/ghc to get the effect of ghc-bin.

The usage is: "emasked ATOM" where ATOM is a POSIX regex matching some porition of the package atom.

There may already be a utility like this, I didn't check too much; if there is, this isn't meant to be "better" or anything. I just had a need and thought others might as well.

One of the reasons might be that the following is a viable approximation of the above script

Code:

grep -B 10 <package-name> /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask

Well...yeah. But mine gives color output and actually groks sections rather than guessing at what line-count would be useful (as well as searching only for package atoms and not matching in the comment section). But yeah, I used something like your example prior to writing this, I just thought somebody (besides me, heh) might find it useful. Guess not.